A long time ago, during a galaxy far, far away…
My name is Tony Gnau, and I own a Milwaukee video
production company. We started in Chicago in 2003 and still have an office
there. A few third of our business remains within the Chicago area, another
third comes from Wisconsin, and therefore the remainder is from customers
scattered everywhere the country from NY to Hawaii.
Yes, we have got a customer in Hawaii… PRETTY AWESOME!
Anyway, once I started my content journey I used to be
blogging about 300 words, every day, for an audience of executives and business
owners. I did this for a few years and wasn’t getting any traction.
They agreed to look at what I used to be doing and suggest a far better
content plan.
That meeting changed everything. We changed my audience, the
amount of words I used to be writing, the frequency… everything.
Did it work? Yes!
We doubled our web traffic for 2 consecutive years, and we saw
significant business gains directly tied to our content.
Since then…
Let me get you up so far. within the previous blog post,
the last year I had statistics for was 2015.
8,833 sessions
6,932 users
Here’s where things have gone since then. The last full year
we've numbers for is 2019. paradiddle, please…
34,714 sessions
29,558 users
Not bad, right?
In 2018, over 85% of our traffic came from organic search.
How did we do it?
You might think, hmmm, that makes sense. T60 has been
performing at the content thing for a couple of more years, so it stands to
reason their numbers would keep rising like that.
True. Sort of.
We have continued to blog and make video content (we are a
video production company after all); however, we haven’t done much of it.
Actually, in some ways, we’ve really been failing.
Say what?!
I can hear you now… Since 2015 you increased sessions and
users by quite 300%, and you’re failing?!
Yes… we've been failing. Let me explain.
Part of our content strategy was to post content on our own
blog once a month. Something substantial. Something super helpful. monthly.
During the last three years, that might have amounted to 36
blog posts.
We only wrote 21.
And if I’m being honest, only about six of these were really
the high-quality content we should always be posting.
Just six blog posts over three years.
Revising our content strategy
A big reason for our initial content marketing success is we
created a juggernaut. We wrote the post, How-to Find Out Video Cost, targeting
the key phrase, video cost.
That post alone continues to draw thousands of views monthly, and that we continually update and sell.
Here’s the thing, and that I hope you'll relate, producing
substantial, helpful, high-quality content like that's hard.
It’s really hard, and between the customer work coming in
and the eagerness to maintain an honest work/life balance, we weren’t ready to devote
the maximum amount of time to making content.
So… rather than working harder, we worked smarter. I know,
total cliché, but true in this case.
The new plan
We decided if we’re not getting to put our hearts into this
monthly, let’s pick our spots and roll in the hay once we can.
That meant writing fewer high-quality posts, but ensuring
those we did write were specialized and focused on a few key phrases we wanted
to focus on.
low-cost videos
DIY marketing videos
We went ahead and created some posts for our blog, and we also wrote some guest posts for other blogs linking back to our own site.
The results
We now rank on Google page one for those phrases, and it
didn’t take long. While it took us a year to rank for that initial juggernaut,
I’d say we were ranking for the new phrases just a couple of months after going
after them.
The secret sauce… a few things.
First, those were key phrases ripe for the picking. once we
checked out our Domain Authority compared to the Domain Authority for the pages
already on page one, we knew we could compete.
Second, and this can’t be underestimated – the juggernaut.
I’m no Google insider, so I can’t say needless to say, but
having a post that’s been killing it for years on Google must have helped… big
time!
As we were devising this new strategy, we likened it to
surfing a wave.
We figured we had built up an enormous wave with the “video
production cost” post, so let’s create some related content. We’ll focus it on
good key phrases for us that we will compete for, and let’s see what happens.
Moving forward
This is the strategy we’re sticking with for the nonce. I’m
already planning a few of the key phrases we’re going after within the coming
months, and we’re hoping to ride the wave again.
It’s important to notice, this all started thereupon the first
big hit of a blog post. I’m now an enormous believer in focused content.
When people ask about our content success, my recommendation
is usually an equivalent. Don’t attempt to do an excessive amount of.
specialize in a manageable approach and follow it.
What’s an enormous question your audience has regarding your
sort of business? Pick one nobody else wants to answer, then… answer that
question.
You can do that
Your competitors won't want to answer that question because
it’s hard or uncomfortable. roll in the hay anyway, and be honest about it.
Focus all of your energy on answering that question. you
would like to create your own wave.
For us, it had been all about video cost. As we checked out
other video production company websites, nobody included prices. the amount one
question we received from all of our customers was always, “How much does a
video cost?”
I don’t think our fellow video producers were trying to
cover their prices, it’s just a troublesome question to answer because there
are numerous variables.
Figuring out how to interrupt it down and share it with our
audience changed the course of our business.
Because we focused on answering a troublesome question and
did it well, we get to surf this awesome wave and you'll roll in the hay too.
So… what question are you getting to answer?
For further information about SEO (Click Here)
For further information about Digital marketing (Click Here)
0 Comments